Keep in touch with customers and sell more ‘digital goods'!

* This is an affiliate link helping me earn a small income for recommending this solution. If you like this review you can support me in my continuing journey of evaluating marketing solutions by using this affiliate link.

Look at this review as an informative piece of content helping you in your decision process for implementing e-commerce functionality into your website environment. In the tutorial video on SendOwl, I will touch how you setup e-commerce by integrating SendOwl for your website.

SendOwl, is a standalone solution for marketers, entrepreneurs, business owners to sell successful digital products. Perfect for bloggers and website owners who are looking to sell their goods easily and quickly. It is most suited for those looking to sell a small number of products, rather than an e-commerce store that sells thousands. Although there is no limitation set, it is not really suitable for building a complete store.

Straightforward to set up and use.

SendOwl is straightforward to set up. After providing your account details and merchant billing details you can start creating your products for which you want start charging. Setting up a payment gateway is very easy. All you have to do is paste over a few API keys from your payment gateway. The checkout page takes a few minutes to configure, and it uses on-site checkout template designs you can select from to customise and fit your site.

Start selling products with SendOwl by providing just 3 basic pieces of information: name of your product, the price, and the file itself. Once provided, you click to 'Create Product' link. SendOwl gives you the code for a buy now button and an add-to-cart button. Simply copy that code and paste it into your site. Visitors then click on the buy button and are led through the checkout process hosted on SendOwl’s secure server. After which they are redirected to a product download page. Combined an email confirmation receipt is send with link to the product download page of the product purchased.

SendOwl Settings

Selling digital goods

You can sell products (digital or physical), services, product bundles, and subscriptions. Personally, I sell digital products and more specifically courses and ebooks. There are different options available for selling digital products in SendOwl.

If you’re running an online business and don’t have a website. You can use social media or use your email lists to sell. Simply post on social email product buy buttons that direct link customers to your payment form.

In practice we mostly see SendOwl's shopping cart system integrated with WordPress. Advantage for WordPress users is that you don't need to worry writing checkout code for your products. SendOwl, generates the code for you and through a simple copy paste you integrate shopping experience in your WordPress website.

If you have many products to sell and are focused on enabling e-commerce to run your business website. You could build your powerful online store with Shopify and complement with SendOwl's greatly features for selling digital goods.

SendOwl Product Creation

​Great integration with Thrive Apprentice

In the market we see third party applications taking advantage of SendOwl's Application Program Interface (API) to integrate shopping cart experience. One such application that can take advantage of SendOwl's e-commerce is Thrive Apprentice, an online course building plugin for WordPress. Thrive Apprentice takes care of hosting your online courses.

Use SendOwl to craft & sell paid online courses straight from your website? Simply setup an API connection from SendOwl to Thrive Apprentice and start selling your courses. The connection with SendOwl ensures that customers can pay you, using multiple different payment systems and that Thrive Apprentice will make sure that only paying customers can access your course.

This solution is by far the most affordable I came across in the market. If you want to build your own information product empire, by selling one or more courses with simple membership setup, with not too much levels, SendOwl in combination with Thrive Apprentice is a no-brainer.

Thrive Apprentice - SendOwl Quick Start Guide

Support myriad of Payment Gateways

In order for your buyers to purchase a product on SendOwl you need to plug in a payment gateway from a service provider that authorizes credit card or direct payments processing for e-businesses. Paste over a few API keys from your payment gateway and get support for PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Bancontact, Giropay, iDEAL, SOFORT and BitPay.

Since the shopping cart checkout is hosted at SendOwl you don’t have to protect any of your customers’ sensitive financial data, like credit card information. It's the payment service provider that collects financial data, the money from customers buying your products and guarantees secure transfer of correct amounts onto your bank account.

SendOwl Support Payment Gateways

Create Salespages with Purchase Links

SendOwl has spent a lot of time developing a checkout system that streamlines and contributes to a great shopping experience. Checkout pages take minutes to configure and selecting on-site checkout overlays make the experience fit your website design.

Share Quick Sell links if you want to bypass the whole shopping cart experience and improving sales and conversions. Additionally there are pre-checkout, post-payment up-sells and abandoned cart reminder mails you can use to draw shoppers back to your website.

Coupons can be administered in one place where you can decide to target individual customers or give discounts to all. You can limit their redemption period, product or spend amount.

SendOwl Purchase Links

​Email Marketing Integration

You keep customers in the know through SendOwl's custom emails feature. Sellers can easily edit, amend and update any email sent out to customers, this to ensure a great shopping experience for their customers. Emails confirming their order is processed, transaction receipts, notifications that an order is dispatched and many more...

My guess is that you will also want keep a customer email list from you buyers by integrating SendOwl with your preferred mailing list provider. So that you can include your buyers to email campaigns later on.

Integrating you mailing list provider will help you segment your customer audience based on buyer persona or on product basis. You only need the API Access URL and the API Key to make this happen. Once setup, you will be able to automatically add shoppers’ email addresses to your mailing lists. Growing your email database and sales will be easier than ever.

Email Marketing Integration - choose your Mailing List Provider

Protect your digital products

There are different ways you can protect your products in SendOwl. For digital files (say, a PDF of your book or an MOV file of your video), you'll upload the file you're selling—and for PDFs, you can choose to stamp the PDF with the customer's name to prevent piracy.

If you are selling software licenses you can as from within SendOwl auto-generate license keys or choose from your own list of keys that you want to accompany your products with.

Another protection system is using redirects. Website links to, likely a non-public page on your website where you send buyers so they can view course materials after their purchase.

SendOwl Protection Digital Goods In Thrive Apprentice

Built-in affiliate system

If you are looking to expand your reach and allow others to promote your products for you. SendOwl, has built-in affiliate program you can use. Simply invite to let them sign up your affiliate program and collect affiliate links they can use on their site. Sales are tracked from these unique affiliate links and reports created, so you can pay your affiliates. You decide the commission that you want to give. Decide on the cookie lifetime, when you will pay affiliates for their referrals, and decide on the terms and conditions for your program.

SendOwl Affiliate program

EU/US sales tax and EU VAT compliant

EU VAT calculation, collection and customer location evidence gathering, is where SendOwl does the heavy lifting for you. The appropriate EU VAT is collected as well as customer location evidence. With all that data on hand, building EU tax remittance reports in SendOwl is a no-brainer. SendOwl also notifies you of any potential customer location discrepancies that require additional customer outreach to resolve. The last being quite an exception to resolve nevertheless this remains a great feature.

For the US, ...SendOwl is partially compliant. Depends if the state where your business resides requires origin-based or destination-based sales tax collection. SendOwl is only great for US sales tax management if you run your business within an origin-based sales tax state. Because you only need to manually manage a few tax rates. For businesses however run from a destination-based US sales tax state SendOwl's Tax reporting feature is impractical.

SendOwl tax reporting

“Sell more digital products with SendOwl"

A right fit for Solopreneurs, Internet Marketers, Small Businesses and High-volume sellers

SENDOWL CONCLUSION

SendOwl offers great conversion-optimized shopping experience fo selling a limited number of digital goods. But even if you go for a large number you can integrate with a more traditional e-commerce solution like Shopify.

Are you considering to selling one or more courses with simple membership setup, with not too much levels on a WordPress website? Do as I did. Combine SendOwl's checkout experience with Apprentice for course hosting.

Finally, I want to stress that SendOwl is one of the rare solutions that excels in tax compliancy and 'reporting' at handling EU VAT.

Lots of possibilities and powerful functionalities for an affordable price if you ask me.

4.5/5

The Good Stuff

Easy to use and clean interface

Very affordable Product

Checkout template builder

Digital Sales Tax (EU VAT MOSS regulations) compliant

In combination with Thrive Apprentice you can not offer free member login to acces courses

* This is an affiliate link helping me earn a small income for recommending this solution. If you like this review you can support me in my continuing journey of evaluating marketing solutions by using this affiliate link.

I am a fluent multilingual Digital Automation Specialist, focused on listening to needs in terms of digital marketing. Interfacing with clients to help them with their online marketing, working with the client to nurture their customers via robust systems for collecting and managing emails. Via carefully thought-out Lists, Tagging and Automations helping to turn a jumble of emails into a valuable Contact Directory where contact is maintained without spamming.